Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019) was an American political activist who founded the LaRouche movement and its main organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He was a prominent conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate. He began in far-left politics in the 1940s and later supported the civil rights movement; however, in the 1970s, he moved to the far-right. By the 1960s, he became engaged in increasingly smaller and more radical splinter groups. During the 1970s, he created the foundation of the LaRouche movement and became more engaged in conspiratorial beliefs and violent and illegal activities. Instead of the radical left, he embraced radical right politics and antisemitism. He also tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination. In the 1996 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he received 5% of the total nationwide vote. In 2000, he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in some states, but the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.
Early life
LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the oldest of three children of Jessie Lenore ( Weir) and Lyndon H. LaRouche Sr. His paternal grandfather's family emigrated to the United States from Rimouski, Quebec, whereas his maternal grandfather was born in Scotland. His father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester before the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.
His parents became Quakers after his father converted from Catholicism. They forbade him from fighting with other children, even in self-defense, which he said led to "years of hell" from bullies at school. As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. He wrote that, between the ages of 12 and 14, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant. He graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940. In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled his father from the group, for reportedly accusing other Quakers of misusing funds, while writing under the pen name Hezekiah Micajah Jones. LaRouche and his mother resigned in sympathy with his father.
University studies, Marxism, marriage
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942. He later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate". As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II and joined a Civilian Public Service camp in lieu of military service. In 1944, he decided to enlist in the United States Army and served with the Medical Corps in India and Burma during the Burma campaign. At the end of the war, he was working as a clerk in the Ordnance Corps, and later described his decision to enlist as the most important decision of his life. In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche said that being asked to express his views on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a group of fellow G.I.s led him to define his "principal lifelong political commitment, that the United States should take postwar world leadership in establishing a world order dedicated to promoting the economic development of what we call today "developing nations".
LaRouche wrote that, while in the conscientious objector camp, he discussed Marxism, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Donald Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism. Back in the U.S., he resumed his education at Northeastern University but dropped out. In 1954 he married Janice Neuberger, a member of the SWP. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.
Career
1960s
Teaching and the National Caucus of Labor Committees
Of LaRouche's paramilitary security force, armed with semi-automatic weapons, a spokesperson said that it was necessary because LaRouche was the subject of "assassination conspiracies".
1984: Schiller Institute, television spots, contact with Reagan administration
thumb|150px|LaRouche during his 1984 presidential campaign
Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984. In the same year, LaRouche raised enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at $330,000 each, in which he called Walter Mondale—the Democratic Party's presidential nominee—a Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints. On April 19, 1986, NBC's Saturday Night Live aired a sketch satirizing the ads, portraying the Queen of the United Kingdom and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers. LaRouche received 78,773 votes in the 1984 presidential election.
In 1984, media reports stated that LaRouche and his aides had met some Reagan administration officials, including Norman Bailey, senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr. There were also reported contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA. The LaRouche campaign said the reporting was full of errors. In 1984 two Pentagon officials spoke at a LaRouche rally in Virginia; a Defense Department spokesman said the Pentagon viewed LaRouche's group as a "conservative group ... very supportive of the administration." White House spokesman Larry Speakes said the Administration was "glad to talk to" any American citizen who might have information. According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off when they became public. Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC, saying he had been in conflict with Oliver North over LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras. According to a LaRouche publication, a court-ordered search of North's files produced a May 1986 telex from Iran–Contra defendant General Richard Secord, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche. According to King, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review was the first to report important details of the Iran–Contra affair, predicting that a major scandal was about to break months before mainstream media picked up on the story.
Strategic Defense Initiative
thumb|180px|alt=photograph|The Wheat Building in [[Leesburg, Virginia, which housed the Fusion Energy Foundation in the 1980s.]]
The LaRouche campaign supported Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Dennis King wrote that LaRouche had been speculating about space-based weaponry as early as 1975. He set up the Fusion Energy Foundation, which held conferences and tried to cultivate scientists, with some success. In 1979, FEF representatives attended a Moscow conference on laser fusion. LaRouche began to promote the use of lasers and related technologies for both military and civilian purposes, calling for a "revolution in machine tools."
According to King, LaRouche's associates had for some years been in contact with members of the Reagan administration about LaRouche's space-based weapons ideas. LaRouche proposed the development of defensive beam technologies as a policy that was in the interest of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as the alternative to an arms race in offensive weapons and as a generator of spin-off economic benefits. Between February 1982 and February 1983, with the NSC's approval, LaRouche met with Soviet embassy representative Evgeny Shershnev to discuss the proposal. During this period, Soviet economists also began to study LaRouche's economic forecasting model. But after Reagan's public announcement of the SDI in March 1983, Soviet representatives broke off contact with LaRouche and his representatives.
LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported in his 2011 memoir that at a 2001 dinner in Russia with leading officials, he was told by General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the second highest-ranking officer in the Russian military, that LaRouche was the brains behind SDI. Rumsfeld said he believed LaRouche had had no influence on the program, and surmised that Baluyevsky must have obtained the information off the Internet. In 2012 the former head of the Russian bureau of Interpol, General Vladimir Ovchinsky, also described LaRouche as the man who proposed the SDI.
1984: NBC lawsuit
In January 1984, NBC aired a news segment about LaRouche, and in March a "First Camera" report produced by Pat Lynch. The reports called LaRouche "the leader of a violence-prone, anti-Semitic cult that smeared its opponents and sued its critics", as Lynch wrote in 1985 in the Columbia Journalism Review. In interviews, former members of the movement gave details about their fundraising practices, and alleged that LaRouche had spoken about assassinating President Jimmy Carter. The reports said an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service would lead to an indictment, and quoted Irwin Suall, the Anti-Defamation League's fact-finding director, who called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler". After the broadcast, LaRouche members picketed NBC's office carrying signs saying "Lynch Pat Lynch," and the NBC switchboard said it received a death threat against her. Another NBC researcher said someone placed fliers around her parents' neighborhood saying she was running a call-girl ring from her parents' home. Lynch said LaRouche members began to impersonate her and her researchers in telephone calls, and called her "Fat Lynch" in their publications.
LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the ADL, arguing that the programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him. The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and LaRouche lost the case. NBC won a countersuit, the jury awarding the network $3 million in damages, later reduced to $258,459, for misuse of libel law, in what was called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant. LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty, which the judge described as "completely lacking in credibility." LaRouche said he had been unaware since 1973 who paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, and lawyers. The judge fined him for failing to answer. After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was delivered to the court to end the case. When LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.
1985–1986: PANIC, LaRouche's AIDS initiative
LaRouche interpreted the AIDS pandemic as fulfillment of his 1973 prediction that an epidemic would strike humanity in the 1980s. According to Christopher Toumey, his subsequent campaign followed a familiar LaRouche pattern: challenging the scientific competence of government experts, and arguing that LaRouche had special scientific insights, and his own scientific associates were more competent than government scientists. LaRouche's view of AIDS agreed with orthodox medicine in that HIV caused AIDS, but differed from it in arguing that HIV spread like the cold virus or malaria, by way of casual contact and insect biteswhich, if true, would make HIV-positive people extremely dangerous. He advocated testing anyone working in schools, restaurants, or healthcare, and quarantining those who tested positive. Some of LaRouche's views on AIDS were developed by John Seale, a British venereological physician who proposed that AIDS was created in a Soviet laboratory. Seale's highly speculative writings were published in three prestigious medical journals, lending these ideas some appearance of being hard science. In 1986 LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases. Sponsored by his "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), Proposition 64or the "LaRouche initiative"qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the required signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications. Seale, presented as an AIDS expert by PANIC, supported the LaRouche initiative, but disagreed with several of LaRouche's views, including that HIV could be spread by insects, and described the group's political beliefs and conspiracy theories as "rather odd". According to David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, the proposal would have required that 300,000 people in the area with HIV or AIDS be reported to public health authorities; might have removed over 100,000 of them from their jobs in schools, restaurants and agriculture; and would have forced 47,000 children to stay away from school.
The proposal was opposed by leading scientists and local health officials as based on inaccurate scientific information and, as the public health schools put it, running "counter to all public health principles." It was defeated, reintroduced two years later, and defeated again, with two million votes in favor the first time, and 1.7 million the second. AIDS became a leading plank in LaRouche's platform during his 1988 presidential campaign.
1986: Electoral success in Illinois; press conference allegations
In March 1986, Mark Fairchild and Janice HartLaRouche National Democratic Policy Committee candidatesunexpectedly won the Democratic primary for statewide offices in Illinois, gaining national attention for LaRouche. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, withdrew his nomination rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche members, and told reporters the party was "exploring every legal remedy to purge these bizarre and dangerous extremists from the Democratic ticket." A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said it would have to do a better job of communicating to the electorate that LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee was unrelated to the Democratic Party. The New York Times wrote that Democratic Party officials were trying to identify LaRouche candidates in order to alert voters, and asked the LaRouche organization to release a full list of its candidates.
A month later, LaRouche held a press conference to accuse the Soviet government, British government, drug dealers, international bankers, and journalists of being involved in multiple conspiracies. Flanked by bodyguards, he said: "If Abe Lincoln were alive, he'd probably be standing up here with me today," and that there was no criticism of him that did not originate "with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation ..." He said he had been in danger from Soviet assassins for over 13 years, and had to live in safe houses. He refused to answer a question from an NBC reporter, saying "How can I talk with a drug pusher like you?" He called the leadership of the United States "idiotic" and "berserk," and its foreign policy "criminal or insane." He warned of the imminent collapse of the banking system and accused banks of laundering drug money. Asked about the movement's finances, he said "I don't know. ... I'm not responsible, I'm not involved in that."
1986–1988: Raids and criminal convictions
In October 1986, hundreds of state and federal officers raided LaRouche offices in Virginia and Massachusetts. A federal grand jury indicted LaRouche and twelve of his associates on credit card fraud and obstruction of justice. The charges stated that they had attempted to defraud people of millions of dollars, including several elderly people, by borrowing money they did not intend to repay. LaRouche disputed the charges, alleging that they were politically motivated.
When LaRouche's "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded, he at first warned law-enforcement officials not to arrest him, saying that any attempt to do so would be an attempt to kill him. A spokesman would not rule out the use of violence against officials in response. While surrounded, LaRouche sent a telegram to president Ronald Reagan saying that an attempt to arrest him "would be an attempt to kill me. I will not submit passively to such an arrest, ... I will defend myself."
In 1987, a number of LaRouche entities, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were taken over through an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. The government's use of a sealed order in this proceeding was regarded as a rare legal maneuver.
On December 16, 1988, LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; eleven counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and a single count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, but was released on parole after serving five years on January 26, 1994.
Defense lawyers filed unsuccessful appeals that challenged the conduct of the grand jury, the contempt fines, the execution of the search warrants, and various trial procedures. At least ten appeals were heard by the United States Court of Appeals, and three were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark joined the defense team for two appeals, writing that the case involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."
In his 1988 autobiography, LaRouche says the raid on his operation was the work of Raisa Gorbachev. In an interview that same year, he said that the Soviet Union opposed him, because he had invented the Strategic Defense Initiative. "The Soviet government hated me for it. Gorbachev also hated my guts and called for my assassination and imprisonment and so forth." He asserted that he had survived these threats, because he had been protected by unnamed U.S. government officials. "Even when they don't like me, they consider me a national asset, and they don't like to have their national assets killed."
LaRouche received 25,562 votes in the 1988 presidential election.
1989: Musical interests and Verdi tuning initiative
LaRouche had an interest in classical music up to the period of Brahms. A motto of LaRouche's European Workers' Party is "Think like Beethoven"; movement offices typically include a piano and posters of German composers, and members are known for their choral singing at protest events and for using satirical lyrics tailored to their targets. LaRouche abhorred popular music; he said in 1980, "Rock was not an accidental thing. This was done by people who set out in a deliberate way to subvert the United States. It was done by British intelligence," and wrote that the Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications."
LaRouche movement members have protested at performances of Richard Wagner's operas, denouncing Wagner as an anti-Semite who found favor with the Nazis, and called a conductor "satanic" because he played contemporary music.
In 1989, LaRouche advocated that classical orchestras should use a concert pitch based on A above middle C (A<sub>4</sub>) tuned to 432 Hz, which the Schiller Institute called the "Verdi pitch", a pitch that Verdi had suggested as optimal, though he also composed and conducted in other pitches such as the French official diapason normal of 435 Hz, including his Requiem in 1874.
The Schiller Institute initiative attracted support from more than 300 opera stars, including Joan Sutherland, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti, who according to Opera Fanatic may not have been aware of LaRouche's politics. A spokesman for Domingo said Domingo had simply signed a questionnaire, had not been aware of its origins, and would not agree with LaRouche's politics. Renata Tebaldi and Piero Cappuccilli, who were running for the European Parliament on LaRouche's "Patriots for Italy" platform, attended Schiller Institute conferences as featured speakers. The discussions led to debates in the Italian parliament about reinstating "Verdi" legislation. LaRouche gave an interview to National Public Radio on the initiative from prison. The initiative was opposed by the editor of Opera Fanatic, Stefan Zucker, who objected to the establishment of a "pitch police," and argued that LaRouche was using the issue to gain credibility.
1990s
Imprisonment, release on parole, attempts at exoneration, visits to Russia
LaRouche began his sentence in 1989, serving it at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. From there he ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia, but he received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for president again in 1992 with James Bevel as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations. It was only the second-ever campaign for president from prison. He received 26,334 votes, standing again as the "Economic Recovery" party. For a time he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily intelligence report by mail, and at times had information about news events days before they happened. Bakker also wrote that LaRouche believed their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."
Viktor Kuzin, a member of the Moscow City Council and a founder of the Democratic Union in Russia, travelled to Minnesota in 1993 to meet LaRouche in prison, and afterwards participated in international campaigns to exonerate LaRouche. An advertisement calling for exoneration was published in several U.S. newspapers, signed by Kuzin, Civil Rights attorney J. L. Chestnut, former Ugandan president Godfrey Binaisa, and others. Chestnut was interviewed in the Tuscaloosa News saying that when he met LaRouche, "I told him that he might as well be black and in Alabama."
The exoneration campaigns garnered the support of a number of State Representatives and State Senators in the U.S., as well as a former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court.
LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County. The Washington Post wrote that he would be supervised by parole and probation officers until January 2004. Also in 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam to blame the Anti-Defamation League for what they alleged were crimes and conspiracies against African Americans, reportedly one of several such meetings since 1992.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote a letter in 1995 to then-Attorney General Janet Reno in which he said that the case against LaRouche involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge". He asserted that, "The government, ex parte, sought and received an order effectively closing the doors of these publishing businesses, all of which were involved in First Amendment activities, effectively preventing the further repayment of their debts." He called the convictions "a tragic miscarriage of justice which at this time can only be corrected by an objective review and courageous action by the Department of Justice". The LaRouche movement organized two panels to review the cases: the Curtis Clark Commission, and the Mann-Chestnut hearings.
Beginning in 1994, LaRouche made numerous visits to Russia, participating in conferences of the Vernadsky State Geological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the RAS Institute of the Far East, and other places. He addressed seminars at the RAS Institute of Economics, the RAS Institute of Oriental Studies. He spoke at hearings in the State Duma of the Russian Federation on measures to ensure the development of the Russian economy at the point of destabilization of the world financial system. Two of his books were translated into Russian.
On September 18, 1996, a full-page advertisement appeared in the New Federalist, a LaRouche publication, as well as The Washington Post and Roll Call. Entitled "Officials Call for LaRouche's Exoneration", its signatories included Arturo Frondizi, former president of Argentina; figures from the 1960s American civil rights movement such as Rosa Parks, Amelia Boynton Robinson (a leader of the Larouche-affiliated Schiller Institute), and James Bevel (a Larouche movement participant); former Minnesota Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy; Mervyn Dymally, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus; and artists such as classical vocalist William Warfield and violinist Norbert Brainin, former 1st Violin of the Amadeus Quartet.
In 1996, LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit. As soon as he began speaking, he was booed off the stage.
In the 1996 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he received enough votes in Louisiana and Virginia to get one delegate from each state, but before the primaries began, the Democratic National Committee chair, Donald Fowler, ruled that LaRouche was not a "bona fide Democrat" because of his "expressed political beliefs ... which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic," and because of his "past activities, including exploitation of and defrauding contributors and voters." Fowler instructed state parties to disregard votes for LaRouche.
LaRouche opposed attempts to impeach President Bill Clinton, charging it was a plot by the British Intelligence to destabilize the U.S. government. In 1996 he called for the impeachment of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.
Efforts to clear LaRouche's name continued, including in Australia, where the Parliament acknowledged receipt of 1,606 petition signatures in 1998.
In 1999, China's press agency, the Xinhua News Agency, reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets, calling it a "scientifically illiterate hoax." On October 13, 1999, during a press conference to announce his plans to run for president, he predicted the collapse of the world's financial system, saying, "There's nothing like it in this century. ... it is systematic and therefore inevitable." He said the U.S. and other nations had built the "biggest financial bubble in all history," which was close to bankruptcy.
2000s
2000–2003: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement, September 11 attacks, presidential run
thumb|upright|alt=photograph|LaRouche supporters in Chicago, 2007
LaRouche founded the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000, saying in 2004 that it had hundreds of members in the U.S. and a lesser number overseas. During the Democratic primaries in June 2000, he received 53,280 votes, or 22% of the total, in Arkansas. Despite finishing above the 15% threshold needed to obtain delegates, LaRouche was denied any delegates and was barred from attending the 2000 Democratic National Convention.
In 2002, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review argued that the September 11 attacks in 2001 had been an "inside job" and "attempted coup d'etat", and that Iran was the first country to question it. The article received wide coverage in Iran, and was cited by senior Iranian government officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani. Mahmoud Alinejad wrote that, in a subsequent telephone interview with the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, LaRouche said the attacks had been organized by rogue elements inside the U.S., aiming to use the incident to promote a war against Islam, and that Israel was a dictatorial regime prepared to commit Nazi-style crimes against the Palestinians.
In 2003, LaRouche was living in a "heavily guarded" rented house in Round Hill, Loudoun County, Virginia.
LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns; Democratic Party officials did not allow him to participate in candidate forum debates. He did not run in 2008.
As during the preceding decade, LaRouche and his followers denied that human civilization had harmed the environment through DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, or carbon dioxide. According to Chip Berlet, "Pro-LaRouche publications have been at the forefront of denying the reality of global warming".
2003–2012: Overseas press coverage, financial crisis
thumb|LaRouche circa 2006.
Iqbal Qazwini wrote in the Arabic-language daily Asharq Al-Awsat in 2003 that LaRouche was one of the first to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 and German reunification. He said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries. According to Qazwini, recent years have seen a proliferation of LaRouche's ideas in China and South Asia. Qazwini referred to him as the spiritual father of the revival of the new Silk Road or Eurasian Landbridge, which aims to link the continents through a network of ground transportation.
In 2005, the People's Daily of China covered LaRouche's economic forecasts and published an eight-part interview with him; the interviewer wrote that LaRouche was "quite famous in mainland China today".
In 2007, LaRouche began a national lobbying campaign to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, saying that it would be possible to save the U.S. banking system by reorganizing it under bankruptcy protection. Also in 2007, he proposed a "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act". This called for the establishment of a federal agency that would "place federal- and state-chartered banks under protection, freeze all existing home mortgages for a period of time, adjust mortgage values to fair prices, restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates, and write off speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities". The bill envisioned a foreclosure moratorium, allowing homeowners to make the equivalent of rental payments for an interim period, and an end to bank bailouts, forcing banks to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. In spring 2007 he was an honorary foreign guest at a ceremony in honor of the 80th birthday of Stanislav Menshikov at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Images at tables of volunteers compared Obama to Adolf Hitler, and at least one had a picture of Obama with a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to attack the volunteers. During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank called the images "vile, contemptible nonsense."
Ideology and beliefs
University of Notre Dame political philosophers Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert write of LaRouche that "[I]t must be nearly unique in American politics that a presidential candidate ... makes the interpretation of Plato a major issue in his campaign."
According to George Johnson, LaRouche saw history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche's views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche believed that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs. Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, and anti-abortion advocates.
In Architects of Fear (1983), Johnson compares LaRouche's view to an Illuminati conspiracy theory; Johnson writes that after he wrote about LaRouche in The Minneapolis Star, LaRouche's followers denounced him as part of a conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt. But according to LaRouche, Aristotelians are not necessarily in communication or coordination with one another: "From their standpoint, [they] are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche said. "If you're asking how their policy is developedif there is an inside group sitting down and making plansno, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously."
In 2011, Stephen E. Adkins's Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History called LaRouche "the leading neo-fascist politician in the United States".
Controversy
LaRouche was described as having "fascistic tendencies", taking positions on the far right (despite his self-identification with the left and some left-wing policies), and creating disinformation.
Designation as a conspiracy theorist
LaRouche was commonly regarded as a conspiracy theorist: for example, in his Fox News obituary. An article in the Southern Poverty Law Center website names him as "a fringe ideologue and conspiracy theorist whom Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates and an expert on the radical right calls "the man who brought us fascism wrapped in an American flag". An NPR obituary is titled Conspiracy Theorist And Frequent Presidential Candidate Lyndon LaRouche Dies At 96. The Washington Post obituary reports he was "often described as an extremist crank and fringe figure" and that he "built a worldwide following based on conspiracy theories, economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism".
Allegations of antisemitism
Beginning in the mid-1970s, allegations began to appear saying that LaRouche had fascist and antisemitic tendencies.
In 1977, LaRouche married his second wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a German 27 years younger than he. Her 1984 book, The Hitler Book, argues that "We need a movement that can finally free Germany from the control of the Versailles and Yalta treaties, thanks to which we have staggered from one catastrophe to another for an entire century." Helga founded the Schiller Institute, which has been described as promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories by the Berliner Zeitung and Political Research Associates, a nonprofit research group that studies right-wing, white supremacist, and militia groups.
LaRouche said he was anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. When the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused LaRouche of antisemitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; the case failed when Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description. LaRouche started a campaign against the ADL and set up a group called "The Provisional Committee to Clean Up B'nai Brith".
LaRouche said in 1986 that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stemmed from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operationwhich is sometimes the same thing"; in 2006, he wrote that "religious and racial hatred, such as antisemitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today." Antony Lerman wrote in 1988 that LaRouche used "the British" as a code word for "Jews", a theory also propounded by Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989). George Johnson argued that King's presentation failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were Jewish. Daniel Pipes wrote in 1997 that LaRouche's references to the British really were to the British, though he agreed that an alleged British–Jewish alliance lay at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.
As of 2016, the Jewish Virtual Library states that "The international organization run by Lyndon LaRouche is a major source of such masked antisemitic theories globally. In the U.S. the LaRouchites spread these conspiracy theories in an alliance with aides to Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the 'Children of Satan', which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel."
Allegations of racism
Manning Marable of Columbia University wrote in 1998 that LaRouche tried in the mid-1980s to build bridges to the black community. Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for African American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance. He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unionsmuch the way Hitler did in Germany." During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not.
Disputed record as economist and forecaster
LaRouche material frequently acclaims him as the world's greatest economist and the world's most successful forecaster. For example, his book title The Economics of the Noösphere: Why Lyndon LaRouche Is the World's Most Successful Economic Forecaster of the Past Four Decades. However, a website of disgruntled ex-movement leaders lists incorrect predictions of sudden world economic collapse, war or depression in 1956, 1961–1970, 1972, 1975–1992, and 1994–2011.
Apart from the numerous failed predictions are claimed some successful predictions or proposals: the eventual reunification of Germany,
According to Christopher Toumey, LaRouche's charismatic authority within the movement was grounded on members' belief that he possessed a unique level of insight and expertise. He identified an emotionally charged issue, conducted in-depth research into it, and then proposed a simplistic solution, which usually involved restructuring of the economy or national security apparatus. He and the membership portrayed anyone opposing him as immoral and part of the conspiracy.
Description as a cult
The LaRouche movement has been described as a cult or cult-like by critics and anti-cult organizations.
A 1987 article by John Mintz in The Washington Post reported that members of the LaRouche movement lived hand-to-mouth in crowded apartments, with their basic needs paid for by the movement. They worked raising money or selling newspapers for LaRouche, doing research for him, or singing in a group choir, spending almost every waking hour together.
The group is known for its caustic attacks on opponents and former members. It has justified what it calls "psywar techniques" as necessary to shake people up; Johnson in 1983 quoted a LaRouche associate: "We're not very nice, so we're hated. Why be nice? It's a cruel world. We're in a war and the human race is up for grabs". Charles Tate, a former LaRouche associate, told The Washington Post in 1987 that members see themselves as exempt from the ordinary laws of society: "They feel that the continued existence of the human race is totally dependent on what they do in the organization, that nobody would be here without LaRouche. They feel justified in a peculiar way doing anything whatsoever."